Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Boreray, St Kilda
Summary
Boreray (Boraraigh; Boreray) is an uninhabited island in the St Kilda archipelago in the North Atlantic.
Boreray lies about west-northwest of North Uist. It covers about , and reaches a height of at Mullach an Eilein.
Boreray is formed of a breccia of gabbro and dolerites.
There are two sea stacks, vertical pillars of rock, just off Boreray. Stac An Armin, to the north, is the taller at 196 metres (643 ft) high, while Stac Lee, 600 m (660 yards) to the west, is 172 metres (564 ft) high.
Boreray is the smallest of the Scottish islands to have a summit over .
Boreray has the Cleitean MacPhàidein, a "cleit village" of three small bothies used regularly during fowling expeditions from Hirta. As a result of a smallpox outbreak on Hirta in 1727, three men and eight boys were marooned on Stac an Armin off the coast of Boreray until the following May.
There are also ruins of Taigh Stallar (the steward's house). The local tradition was that it was built by the "Man of the Rocks", who led a rebellion against the landlord's steward. It may be an example of an Iron Age wheelhouse and the associated remains of an agricultural field system and two additional possible settlement mounds were discovered in 2011. RCAHMS surveyor Ian Parker said: “This new discovery shows that a farming community actually lived on Boreray, perhaps as long ago as the prehistoric period. The agricultural remains and settlement mounds give us a tantalising glimpse into the lives of those early inhabitants. Farming what is probably one of the most remote – and inhospitable – islands in the North Atlantic would have been a hard and gruelling existence. And given the island’s unfeasibly steep slopes, it’s amazing that they even tried living there in the first place.”
Macauley (1764) reported the existence of five druidic altars in the islands including a large circle of stones fixed perpendicularly in the ground, by the Stallar House.
The islands were bought in 1931 by the ornithologist John Crichton-Stuart, 5th Marquess of Bute.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.